ELRA (European Language Resources Association), was founded in Luxembourg in February
1995, as a non-profit organization, with the goal of promoting the creation, verification and distribution of Language Resources (LR). In addition to helping users and developers, government agencies, and other interested parties exploit language resources for a wide variety of use, ELRA serves as the European repository for EU-funded language resources, and interact with similar bodies in other parts of the world. Funded in the medium term by membership fees, grants from the European Commission and national governments, together with projects income, the Association will be financially self-supporting in the long run. A 12-member Board is in charge of the strategy and objectives to be adopted by the Association.
Relevant LR are Spoken Databases, Lexica, Grammars, Written Corpora and Terminological
Data. These are required for the development of speech and text processing systems for a large number of applications in various information technology areas.
ELRA licences LR for R&D, as soon as these are made available. According to the
agreements made between ELRA and its providers, resources can be either reserved for
research purposes or used for the development of products and services. Licence agreements, drawn with the support of lawyers, are used for negotiations. Such contracts are available at ELRA office. Lexica, Corpora (spoken and written), Grammars and Tools are described in easy-to-understand presentation forms. All these documents can be found on the ELRA Web site.
ELRA Newsletters
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A Newsletter is released by ELRA every Quarter. The next three issues will primarily and
alternatively be devoted to each of the 3 Colleges of the Association : spoken, written and terminological resources. The October Newletter (vol.1 n.3) is already available at ELRA office. It is entirely dedicated to Terminology. The next two issues will be dedicated to written and spoken resources.
The ELRA Web site
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The ELRA Web site is now available in English and French. The URL addresses are:
English version: http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html,
French version : http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/fr/home.html,
ELRA Language Resources catalogue
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A catalogue of the LR negotiated or under negotiation by ELRA can be found on our Web site. For quotation, please refer to this site or directly to ELRA office. A published version is released twice a year (together with number 1 and 3 of the Newsletter).
Resources appearing in the catalogue are separated according to the three Colleges : spoken resources, written resources (corpora, lexica and tools) and terminological resources. The catalogue consists of :
1) Spoken resources : 30 databases (recordings from microphone, telephone, continuous speech, isolated words, several languages, etc.).
2) Written resources :
* 9 monolingual and multilingual corpora
* 12 monolingual lexica
* Over 30 multilingual lexical
* A linguistic software platform and Grammars Development platform
3) Terminological resources : over 90 databases with a wide range of domains and several
languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Danish, Italian, Catalan, Turkish, Polish,
Portuguese).
ELRA Membership
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ELRA members are entitled to substantial discounts on public prices of the resources and other products (such as the Guide for Terminology Agreements and several commercial reports).
ELRA membership is open to any organization, public or private, with full membership
(including voting privileges) being available to organizations registered in Europe. Purely for organizational purposes, members will be assigned to one of the Colleges on the basis of their main area of interest. The annual membership fee has been set at a modest ECU 1,000 to encourage broad participation. You may also opt to join more than one College, in which case you will be required to pay multiple membership fees.
Please ask for a membership form or download it from the ELRA Web site.
For further information :
ELRA/ELDA
87, Avenue d'Italie
FR-75013 PARIS
FRANCE
Tel : +33 01 45 86 53 00
Fax : +33 01 45 86 44 88
E-mail : elra@calva.net
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html